The list of MOOCs (Massive online courses) seems to be expanding as rapidly as the known universe.

In The American Conservative, Wheaton College Professor Alan Jacobs shares his lack of enthusiasm for this development.

When I think about turning all this into a MOOC, my first thought is: How easy that would be. Just write out a lecture and deliver it? Piece of cake — especially in comparison to the hard work of trying to learn a book and its contexts well enough to be ready when people ask those questions you didn’t expect, offer thoughts you hadn’t thought. And those questions and thoughts can change the course not just of a single class session but of the whole semester, as different ways of connecting various works come into play in response to what students want to know.

And my second thought about teaching a MOOC is: How shockingly boring that would be. To stand up there and recite what you’ve prepared beforehand in complete ignorance of and indifferent to the needs, thoughts, and questions of the people in the room before you, and the hundreds or thousands of other people who are watching and listening on their computers — not my idea of a good time.

Of course, many people lecture in just that way. As Nathan Heller comments in the essay I linked to above,

Lecturing can seem a rote endeavor even at its best — so much so that one wonders why the system has survived so long. Actors, musicians, and even standup comedians record their best performances for broadcast and posterity. Why shouldn’t college teachers do the same? Vladimir Nabokov, a man as uncomfortable with extemporaneity as he was enamored of the public record, once suggested that his lessons at Cornell be recorded and played each term, freeing him for other activities. The basis of a reliable education, it would seem, is quality control, not circumstance; it certainly is not a new thought that effective teaching transcends time and place. Correspondence courses cropped up in the nineteenth century. Educational radio appeared in the twenties and the thirties. The U.K.’s Open University, which used television to transmit lessons to students, enrolled its first students in 1971.

And if you think of lecturing as Nabokov did, why not make a MOOC? But for me it would be a savage diminishment of what I love about teaching. I’d rather find a new line of work.